exiled preacher and opponent Fethullah Gülen is dead, announces Turkish public television

The Muslim preacher had lived in the United States since 1999. He was accused by Ankara of having fomented a coup attempt against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

His supporters had become a scarecrow for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president. Muslim preacher and opponent Fethullah Gülen is dead, announced Monday October 21Turkish public television TRT, citing X accounts and websites close to his movement. According to the channel, the 83-year-old man died Sunday evening in a hospital in the United States, where he lived. He was accused by Ankara of having plotted a coup attempt in Türkiye in July 2016.

Inspirer of the Gülen movement, also called the “Hizmet” movement, Fethullah Gülen had been based in Pennsylvania, in the United States, since 1999. Turkey had stripped him of his Turkish nationality in 2017. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had made him his sworn enemy after the attempted coup of July 15, 2016, and has since caused hundreds of arrests in the ranks of the Gülenists.

The preacher, accused by the Turkish power of leading a group “terrorist”claimed it was just a network of charities and businesses. Fethullah Gülen and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also from political Islam, were long allies before that: the Turkish head of state even took advantage of the Gülen network, in the 2000s, to establish his power against the Kemalist establishment , defender of a secular Turkey.

But the cordial understanding between the two men, weakened from 2010, was shattered when a corruption scandal, orchestrated by magistrates attached to the Gulenist nebula, splashed the circle of intimates of the then Prime Minister at the end of 2013. Erdogan. Fethullah Gülen becomes public enemy number 1. After the 2016 coup attempt, unprecedented purges were organized, with more than 125,000 people dismissed from public institutions, including some 24,000 soldiers and thousands of magistrates .